Even if you refuse to accept the extensive claims that the Gujarat administration conspired to aid and abet the mobs that rampaged through the state in 2002, what is indisputable is that it failed spectacularly to stop them.
The past month has been grim even by the standards of Narendra Modi’s “New India”. We have been assailed by a series of spectacles that catch the breath: the political persecution of a fact-checker on the complaint of an anonymous tweeter, the meticulously orchestrated overthrow of a government in Maharashtra and a religiously inspired murder in Rajasthan. But the most disturbing event was the Supreme Court’s dismissal of Zakia Jafri’s plea to revisit Modi’s exoneration by a special investigation team commissioned by the apex court in 2008 to probe the sectarian carnage that swept through Gujarat in 2002. Jafri’s plea …
Kapil is a journalist, book critic and author. His first book, Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India (2019), was published to critical and commercial acclaim in India, the UK and the US. He has written from South Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East—including Syria, Pakistan and Palestine—and his work appears, among other publications, in The New York Times, The Critic, Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, The Economist, TIME, CNN, The Guardian and Le Monde diplomatique. He is a frequent contributor to The Spectator and an international affairs panellist on Monocle24 radio.
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